The Play Ethic

Play Ethic lecture, Brisbane Festival of Ideas

Hello to everyone who attened the Cremone Theatre in Brisbane, on March 31st. What follows is the unamended text of my lecture to the Brisbane Festival of Ideas on 'The Power of Play'. I'd be delighted if you used the comment box below to respond to the piece, in any way and at any length you see fit. If you want to contact me about any issues directly, or find out more about the Play Ethic book, the links are below. You can download a fully footnoted version on MS Word from this link.

best wishes, pk 

The Power of Play

Lecture by Pat Kane at Brisbane Festival of Ideas, Friday 31st March, 2003

For more information, contact [email protected]
And visit http://www.theplayethic.com

The crisis of work + the ‘work ethic’

We – and by ‘we’ I mean the developed nations – are in a state of crisis about work: about what we do when we work, what it does to us when we work, even what the very nature of work is. And this is a particularly propitious time and place to be talking publicly about this topic. In France, millions of students and workers have been taking to the streets to protest against the ‘precarite’, or precariousness, that new deregulations of the labour market hold out for their lives. While in Australia, laws pointing in a similar direction cause many heated column inches but, as far as I can tell, little storming of the barricades. (Maybe they were all stormed, and dismounted, before I arrived).

Surfing (the zeitgeist) in Brisbane

Been here for a few days at the Brisbane Festival of Ideas, at which I'm speaking this Friday. This is my third trip to a major Australian city since the Play Ethic launched as a website in 2000 (Sydney in 2001, Melbourne in 2002), which is at least some evidence that its themes find resonance here. I'm preparing my lecture at the moment, which I'm intending to be a kind of assessment of the idea after nearly ten years of thinking about it - a pretty shocking realisation for me. (Should I change my tune, or sing it better? Hmm). I'll be posting it here on Friday, fully hotlinked, and with an invitation for as much commentary and response as possible.

In the meantime, here's some local press I've been doing:

• firstly an interview with Time Off, Queensland's "premier street magazine". And it's my luck that the writer used to be a student when I was Rector of Glasgow University...
• next, an interview with The Courier and Mail (jpeg), Queensland's quality tabloid
• and finally, a half-hour talk on ABC Radio's The Conversation, with Richard Fiedler.

Iron cage in the head

It’s always an event when Richard Sennett publishes, even though I have problems with the gloominess of his take on the effects of information capitalism on peoples’ lives. I’m halfway through his new book, The Culture of the New Capitalism, so I won’t comment definitively – but a friend has read it, Madeleine Bunting, who basically agrees with Sennett. Here’s a representative quote:

What Sennett seems to be suggesting is that, in much of the workplace, there are no longer any rules. It's the chancer, the trickster, the chameleon, the illusionist on the hunt for the big break who flourishes. The rest of us, insecure and anxious, just hope to scrape together a sense of connectedness sufficient to keep loneliness, disorientation and meaninglessness from the door.

Passages like this – which seems to indict play values (chance, trickiness, chameleonic, illusory) as the unraveller of stable work cultures – make me realise just how far ahead of the consensus my arguments for a play ethic are. Can we still only conceive of purposeful, meaningful activity as that which occurs within public or private organisations, for which we exchange labour for wages? The mobile internet hints at a more ‘commonist’ society, which can support innovation and self-directed activity in many different locations – at home, in the street, as we travel.

But the idea that social regulation could support this fluid style of producing and making – say with a social wage or income supplements, or free communication channels – is far off. If even the best writers and thinkers (Bunting and Sennett) cannot themselves abandon those semi-military metaphors of bureaucracy and organisation, cannot escape Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of convention, then a players’ society will have to emerge from the margins. The metaphysics of the work ethic still grips the minds of Anglo-American public intellectuals too tightly.

Play Ethic out today in US

This is the official release date of the Play Ethic in the US - welcome to all and any readers. If you want to know more about the project, please visit the main website, or dive into this blog and its archives - the entries are organised by chapter theme.